This article was written by Dr Fox and was first published in the Sunday Times on 4th January 2015.
As 2015 starts, Russia finds itself in trouble. Already facing damaging sanctions over the illegal annexation of Crimea, it is now also suffering from the dramatic drop in global oil prices. Vladimir Putin has long enjoyed domestic popular support as the man who rebuilt Russian status following the debacle of the Yeltsin years. It is true that the West showed too little understanding of the trauma that the fall of the Soviet Union brought to the psyche of both its citizens and its leaders and the rise of Putin was, in part, the political result of this.
Yet, Russia’s difficult position today is a tragedy that is largely of Putin’s making. First, there is a complete strategic failure to adjust to the new realities of the globalised era. In any rational world, Russia would recognise that it has large strategic overlaps with many of the Western nations, not least the threats posed by the rise of China and the growing problem of Islamic fundamentalism, much of it on Russia’s southern borders. Yet, instead of trying to find common ground with the West, Russia’s recently updated military doctrine still casts NATO as the biggest threat to the Russian security. Like some latter-day Don Quixote, Putin still attacks Western “aggression” in order to prop up his political position and justify the large increases in his own defence spending.
Second, the Putin Kremlin still clings to Cold War doctrines which put them on collision with the free world. In particular, the insistence on the concept of a “near abroad”, in other words, a veto on the foreign and security policies of its immediate geographic neighbours, is a remnant of a bygone era. Many of the former Soviet satellite states, such as Poland or the Baltic states, gravitated towards the West precisely because they believed that sovereign nations should be able to exercise self-determination. In the same way, the apparent belief that ethnic Russians, wherever they live, are to be protected, not by the laws or constitutions of the countries in which they live, but by an external force i.e. Russia, drives a coach and horses through our concept of international law.
The third problem facing the Putin government is the miscalculation that they made about the international community’s response to their activities in Crimea, in particular, and Ukraine in general. This is partially understandable given the record of appeasement by the West towards Russian aggression in recent years. From the cyber attack on Estonia to the invasion and occupation of Georgia, the West has shown a pitiful level of response in the face of Russian provocation. Yet it must surely have been foreseen in the Kremlin that Chancellor Merkel, with her own memories of life in Soviet dominated East Germany, could not possibly tolerate Russian adventurism in Ukraine without response, notwithstanding Germany strong economic interests in Russia. The willingness of David Cameron and the British government to lead the call for sanctions is also to our great credit. These sanctions are now contributing to the fourth, and greatest problem facing Russia in 2015, a problem that may well have a ripple effect across Europe and beyond. The Russian economy has long been beset by rampant corruption, cronyism and a lack of diversification. In recent years it has been sustained by high fuel prices, resulting in large fiscal surpluses and a large accumulation of currency reserves. In recent weeks, however, as the oil price has tumbled the rouble has faced a meltdown, money has been poured into bank bailouts and the spectre of political instability has reappeared. Alexei Kudrin, a long time Putin ally and a favourite to become the next Russian Prime Minister has said that payment discipline will fall significantly and company defaults will follow. More ominously, he claims that falling living standards will produce increasing protest activity The authoritarian nature of the Putin regime, and its willingness to crush dissent is likely to worsen if the economic crisis results in public dissatisfaction with Putin himself. Yet the answer to, at least part, of his problems lies in his own hands. Kudrin has made clear that Russia can only navigate its current economic difficulties successfully if it normalises its relations with its business partners, especially Europe and the United States. What should the response be in the West? There can be no question in softening our resolve over the positions of the Crimea and Ukraine for to do so would simply be taken as weakness inside the Kremlin. But while maintaining our firm line we should also make clear to the Russian leadership that we understand the scale of their economic difficulties and have no wish to see a collapse of the Russian economy. In return for the removal of the Russian threat to Ukraine, access to capital markets might be reinstated, easing at least part of the financial horror the country is facing. The tragedy is that all this might have been prevented with a leadership that looked forwards and outwards rather than backwards and inwards.
The people of Russia, and to an extent, Russia’s economic trade partners are likely to pay a high price for this failure. The loss of greater co-operation on global security matters is yet another cost to be borne. All of this is a tragedy that will cast a long shadow over 2015, but it is a tragedy made in the Kremlin by Vladimir Putin.